Jean Berko Gleason

Jean Berko Gleason (born December 19, 1931, Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.) is an American psycholinguist best known as the creator of the Wug Test, a tool used to study children’s language acquisition. A pioneer in the field of children’s language, Gleason has been called the founder of experimental developmental psycholinguistics. She created the Wug Test to examine how children deal with unknown words and to find out whether they understand simple language rules. The test was published in 1958.

Gleason’s interest in language began at a young age, when she acted as an interpreter for her elder brother, Marty, who had cerebral palsy. People generally had a hard time understanding him when he spoke, but Gleason was adept at understanding and conveying his speech to others. Gleason credits the experience with making her more sensitized to language.

While studying history and literature at Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gleason took a course called “The Psychology of Language,” which covered language acquisition, processing, production, and comprehension. This greatly influenced her decision to go to graduate school to study linguistics. After she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1953, she went on to earn a master’s degree in linguistics, also at Radcliffe, in 1955 and a Ph.D. in linguistics and social psychology at Harvard University in 1958.

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In the 27-picture Wug Test, children are presented with illustrations of imaginary creatures, objects, and actions, all of which have nonsense names, and are asked to describe them. The test was named for the birdlike creature featured in the first prompt question, which reads: “This is a WUG. Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two ___.” The correct response is “wugs.” Another picture features a man balancing a ball on his nose. The prompt reads: “This man knows how to ZIB. What is he doing? He is ___. What would you call a man whose job is to ZIB? ___.” The correct responses are “zibbing” and “a zibber.”

With the Wug Test, Gleason demonstrated that even children as young as four years old can produce correct plural, past tense, possessive, and present participle grammar forms. She also showed that they can make verbs into agents for words they have never previously heard, thus proving that children are predisposed to learn and use grammar.

Much of Gleason’s professional career was spent at Boston University. She was a professor in the department of psychology from 1975 through 2005. She served as program director of the graduate program in applied linguistics from 1982 through 1985, chair of the department of psychology from 1985 through 1989, acting chair of the department of psychology in 1997, and research fellow in the department of cognitive and neural systems from 1994 through 2005. Gleason has also been a visiting scholar at Stanford University and the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as well as a research scholar at the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, among other professional appointments.

In addition to her work on language acquisition, Gleason has contributed valuable findings to areas including aphasia, language attrition, and gender differences in parents’ speech. She has published more than 125 scholarly articles and is the coauthor and editor of two widely used textbooks: The Development of Language (1985, 10th edition 2022) and Psycholinguistics (1993, 2nd edition 1997).

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